The importance of a balanced diet in maintaining a healthy lifestyle is better appreciated by a growing number of individuals, and interest in finding a reasonable means of managing one's diet is increasing. Several diet control systems and methods are available to assist in this management effort.
One of the most common systems starts with a pre-set daily calorie limit, then requires the user to estimate the calories in each item of food being consumed and to cease eating when that calorie limit is reached. One drawback to this type system is the difficulty in estimating the number of calories in food being consumed. Another drawback is the difficulty of planning in advance for foods to be consumed so that a balanced diet is maintained.
A book published by the American Diabetic Association for use by diabetics sets forth different foods in various groups along with the quantity that represents a unit or portion of each of the different foods. These exchange groups contain foods with similar amounts of carbohydrate, protein, fat, and calories. A diabetic is taught how to use this book in order to maintain the diet prescribed by medical personnel. The difficulties with a diet control method involving a book is that it is time consuming and requires recordation of what has been consumed.
Systems requiring a written record of the food consumed are inherently more complex to use and frequently subject to inadvertence and oversight so that at the end of the day the question arises as to what and how much of a particular food was consumed.
Other systems or methods involve moving pegs, cards, tickets, magnets or other objects representing portions of various food groups from an original location to a second location as the user consumes the various foods. While these systems or methods provide systematic monitoring of a diet, they tend to be too bulky to be carried easily, cumbersome to use, and the various movable parts are subject to being misplaced.
As a result of the above described problems and deficiencies, none of the known systems or methods for managing a diet has successfully satisfied the need for a portable, easy-to-use device and method to calculate and track the number of calories from each of several food groups consumed in a day.
Therefore, it is a principal object of the present invention to provide such a portable, easy-to-use device and method.